Pedagogy & Scholarly Agenda

Education is the foundation of freedom.

But freedom does not begin or end in a classroom. It lives in how we imagine, question, create, remember, and connect. My pedagogy is rooted in the belief that learning should transform us. It should free us — mind, body, and spirit.

I teach with the whole self. I teach to spark imagination. I teach to reclaim time, space, and story. Across my work as an educator, scholar, filmmaker, writer, and curriculum developer, I understand teaching as a form of liberation practice: a way of helping students see themselves as thinkers, writers, creators, and participants in the ongoing work of world-making.

My Scholarly Agenda

My scholarly agenda sits at the intersection of Black speculative imagination, African diasporic spirituality, Black feminist thought, pedagogy, memory studies, disability justice, cultural production, and public humanities.

At the center of my work is a commitment to Afrofuturism as more than an aesthetic or genre. I understand Afrofuturism as a practice, method, and liberatory framework. It is a way of reading history, confronting trauma, honoring ancestral knowledge, and imagining otherwise. It asks not only what futures we can imagine, but how those futures shape the way we teach, write, gather, remember, and live now.

My scholarship examines how Black people — especially Black women, Black girls, Black disabled people, artists, educators, and cultural workers — have imagined, remembered, taught, healed, and created toward freedom, even under conditions designed to make freedom seem impossible.

A central thread in my work is what I call Practical Afrofuturism: the study and practice of Black speculative imagination as a tool for teaching, healing, creativity, community-building, and social transformation. Practical Afrofuturism brings together literature, storytelling, ritual, reflection, cultural memory, and critical inquiry to ask how Black communities have always made life, meaning, and possibility in the face of rupture.

My scholarship is especially concerned with Black women writers, artists, and thinkers whose creative and intellectual labor offers models for survival, transformation, and world-making. I bring early twentieth-century African American and Caribbean women writers into conversation with contemporary Afrofuturist thought, Black feminist theory, African diasporic spiritual systems, disability justice, and public humanities.

Across my scholarly, creative, and public-facing projects, I ask: How do Black people carry historical trauma without allowing trauma to be the whole story? How do memory and imagination become methods of survival? How do Black women’s literary and artistic practices help us theorize freedom? And how can Afrofuturism become a practical framework for education, healing, and community transformation?

Guiding Research Questions

My scholarly and creative work is shaped by several guiding questions:

How have Black women writers, artists, educators, and cultural workers used speculative imagination to confront racial, gendered, colonial, and historical violence?

How do memory, trauma, ritual, and ancestral knowledge shape Black literature, cultural production, and practices of survival?

What does Afrofuturism become when understood not only as genre or aesthetic, but as pedagogy, spiritual practice, public humanities method, and liberatory praxis?

How do Black communities use storytelling, art, education, embodiment, and collective memory to imagine and build more livable futures?

How can Practical Afrofuturism offer tools for teaching, healing, writing, community-building, and institutional transformation?

My work is rooted in the belief that Black imagination is not escape. It is evidence. It is method. It is memory. It is strategy. It is one of the ways we have always made life possible.

My Pedagogical Praxis

My teaching is grounded in the belief that education should help students become more critical, creative, reflective, and self-aware thinkers. I understand the classroom as a space of inquiry, rigor, imagination, and care — a place where students learn not only how to analyze texts, but how to ask deeper questions about themselves, their communities, and the world they are inheriting and shaping.

As an educator, I teach writing, literature, Afrofuturism, cultural studies, and critical inquiry through a liberatory and student-centered framework. My courses invite students to see writing as a process of discovery rather than simply a product to be graded. I want students to understand that their ideas matter, that their questions matter, and that intellectual work is not separate from lived experience.

My pedagogy is deeply shaped by Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism, public humanities, disability justice, and culturally responsive teaching. I ask students to engage texts, images, films, music, archives, and lived experiences as sites of knowledge. In my classroom, students are not passive recipients of information. They are thinkers, writers, researchers, collaborators, and world-builders.

I am especially interested in helping students understand writing as a practice of meaning-making. This means slowing down, noticing patterns, revising ideas, listening carefully, and learning how to enter conversations with clarity and purpose. I emphasize process, reflection, revision, and intellectual risk-taking. I also make space for students to recognize the relationship between writing and voice, writing and power, writing and memory, writing and freedom.

Afrofuturism is central to my teaching because it allows students to engage imagination as a serious intellectual practice. Through Afrofuturism, students can examine history, technology, race, gender, disability, environment, spirituality, and culture while also asking what other futures might be possible. This approach helps students understand that imagination is not separate from analysis. It is part of how we critique the world and begin to transform it.

Five Guiding Principles

Education is for Everyone

Knowledge lives in books, in bodies, in communities, in archives, in art, in story, and in lived experience. My teaching honors the self-taught, the culturally taught, and those rediscovering their voices.

Imagination is Resistance

Afrofuturism, storytelling, and speculative methods challenge what is and make space for what could be. Imagination is not a retreat from reality. It is one of the tools we use to critique reality and begin reshaping it.

Learning with the Whole Self

I bring in reflection, ritual, personal narrative, embodiment, and creative practice so that learning becomes more than intellectual exercise. Students are invited to think deeply, feel honestly, and make meaningful connections between course material and lived experience.

Reclaiming Time, Space, and Self

We connect past, present, and possible futures to shape grounded, liberatory practice. This is how we reclaim our narratives. This is how we understand history not as something behind us, but as something we are always interpreting, carrying, and transforming.

Community is the Classroom

Learning is communal. In every course or workshop, I work to build a space where shared wisdom leads the way. Students learn from texts, from me, from themselves, and from one another.

In Practice: What This Looks Like in the Classroom

My courses are designed to do more than meet outcomes. They are designed to transform. Drawing from Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, cultural critique, writing studies, and public humanities, I create learning spaces where students feel seen, supported, and stretched.

Education as Freedom

Students are invited to reclaim their voices, see themselves as part of living history, and understand writing and inquiry as tools for change. I want students to leave my courses with a deeper sense of their own intellectual power.

Storytelling and Reflection

Whether we are analyzing literature, studying film, discussing cultural history, or writing personal essays, storytelling is central. I regularly incorporate journaling, creative projects, discussion, and reflective writing to deepen engagement.

Critical Meets Creative

In courses such as Black Speculative Fiction, students not only analyze texts; they create their own speculative futures. In Writing and Critical Inquiry, students use research, rhetoric, and reflection to explore the world and consider how they might reshape it.

Holistic Engagement

We talk about identity, power, memory, history, and lived experience. We connect the personal to the structural. We ask big questions and make room for honest, vulnerable, and rigorous reflection.

Access and Inclusion

My classrooms are built for students at every starting point. I diversify materials, honor varied learning styles, and actively create space for those too often pushed to the margins. Care does not mean lowering expectations. It means creating the conditions where students can meet meaningful expectations with support, clarity, and dignity.

What Students Carry Forward

Students leave my courses with stronger critical thinking skills: the ability to analyze texts, ideas, images, histories, and cultural practices deeply and connect them to broader social, political, and historical contexts.

They leave with a clearer sense of empowerment: a deeper understanding of their own stories and how those stories intersect with larger movements for liberation, creativity, and change.

They leave with practical tools for change: skills in writing, collaboration, research, reflection, and creative problem-solving that they can apply in their personal, professional, academic, and community lives.

They also leave with a deeper relationship to imagination. I want students to understand that imagination is not separate from critical thinking. It is part of how we question the world, remember what has been erased, and envision what else might be possible.

Teaching, for me, is a form of public scholarship and world-building. It is one of the ways we practice freedom in real time.